


The Leader's of the Not Coming Back's

by lukedancewithme



Category: 5 Seconds of Summer (Band)
Genre: M/M, superpower au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-09 22:35:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4366811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lukedancewithme/pseuds/lukedancewithme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're all just trying to get by</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Leader's of the Not Coming Back's

**Author's Note:**

  * For [5secondsoflashton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/5secondsoflashton/gifts).



> prompt: superpower au where superpowers are seen as defects and anyone with superpowers should be captured and/or killed
> 
> this has so much potential to be so much better if i had any time management skills  
> I'm going to rework it because I'm really not feeling how it came out, so expect more!

The kitchen is silent when Robert walks in, an indication that he is home alone. The sink is dripping, the rhythmic thunk thunk telling him that Ben once again forgot to shove the faucet to the left because it broke a while back and now needs to be wedged in at a certain angle to prevent leaking. There is toast half made on the counter, the butter melted into one large lump in its browned center. A glass of orange juice is collecting condensation at the spot where his father usually sits, the beads of water running down and pooling at the bottom in a small puddle. The mid-morning sun is fighting its way across the room, its presence fleeting when it should be strong. Something isn’t right.  
Robert walks around the island to the sink, shifting the handle so that the dripping stops and he can think clearly. As he moves from the sink, his right foot hits something small and noisy. He looks down to find a set of car keys, his mom’s keys. Where is his family if they haven’t taken the car? He moves to the window to see if there are any signs of his family on the porch when he firsts spots the men, all tall and stocky and entirely in black. They have patches on their left upper arms with a yellow inscripted MCU, the letters as bold and unnerving as the day Robert first saw them. And he is filled with the same dread now.

The men start moving closer to the window, desolate eyes locked with his. Roberts spins around to escape, thoughts of his family being dragged away by the men worrying his mind. But he’s too late, all around him are black suits and yellow-bands and Robert swears they're multiplying. He can’t think straight, his breathing picks up, he’s going to vomit. He thinks that even that won’t slow the advancing figures, hands posed out to reach for him.  
They reach and reach and reach and he can feel glove-clad fingers brushing his arms.  
And suddenly….  
Robert flails awake, his chest covered in damp sweat, sticky and cool. He can feel more perspiration running down from his temples mixing with the drying tracks of his tears. He’s breathing hard, like when he was younger and would try to stay underwater longer than Jack but would always end up sputtering and gasping for oxygen. He tries to slow his airflow, get it regulated, his head hurts from his ragged breaths. When he breathes in, he is hit with the smell of pancakes, soft and sweet to his nose. The smell makes him sigh, it was all a dream.  
He can’t say he’s surprised, these nightmares have been plaguing him since he was eight, and the first MCU officer came in to talk with his class. He remembers how frightened he was, how he was extra extra good that week in fear that they would come and take him away, even though his mother assured him that would not happen, not unless he was one of them.

MCU- Mutant Control Unit. The organization was implemented right after the first uprising of the Infected. Its job was to identify Infectants and gather them for research so that a cure may be discovered. Except that it was more like a dog catcher, collecting Infectants that had been turned in by their own family, apathetically slaughtering those who refused treatment. The smart ones ran as soon as they discovered they were Infected, became fugitives and attempted to dodge their way up north, where the Infectants were seen as more, as potential heros.  
Infectants were the product of nuclear wastelands, chemically altered crops, and natural evolution. Their altered genes gave them abilities, DNA born powers, that gave them an advantage over regular humans. Many grew weary of their superiority and a mass genocide occurred. Millions of Infectants were sought out and killed. The name Mutant branded into them, dirty and cruel. No where was safe.

Millions were killed, but millions more bound together, first in secret, then against the people. The first uprising began and though the genocide stopped, the Infectants were not seen as equals and the search for a cure began.  
Children were taught at a young age that Infectants were below them, that they were the scum of the earth and if you were to discover you were one, you must either turn yourself in to participate in research, or off yourself to help cleanse the earth. After learning all this at a ripe age of eight, Robert had been frightened into night terrors which continued now, even as he was an 17 year old. 

He has nothing to worry about however, no one in his family had ever been identified as Infected, meaning the mutated gene was not apart of his make-up. This did little to treat his fears however. The phobia was set deep, dark within his mind and hovering over him every time he heard of another neighbor taken by the MCU. 

Robert drags himself out of bed, limbs sore from the movement of his dreams he's sure. His dog Molly slowly pushes his bedroom door open with her muzzle. She's old, too old at this point and Robert's is going to miss her regardless of her sluggish movements and senile behavior. She trots over and nuzzles into Robert's open palm, her nose is cold and moist and it causes goosebumps to break out along his arm. 

He walks down stairs and greets his mother, stacking pancakes high on his plate and drenching them in syrup, and everything is perfectly ordinary. 

*

Robert decides to spend the sunny morning playing with his aging pet while everyone else is at work. They’re playing fetch like always, and Robert is patient when Molly misses the ball and has to crawl towards it. She misses so bad this time that the ball rolls all the way across the road and is only stopped by the curb, and he watches with a small smile as she chases after it. Molly is in the street now, crossing as swiftly as her aging legs will let her. Robert hears the speeding car before he sees it which gives him the opportunity to lunge into the street towards Molly. He doesn't know what he expects to happen, but as the car barrels closer to them his only action is to put his hand up, in hopes of alerting the driver to slow down. 

He doesn't expect for his palm to crush straight into the front grate, effectively stopping the vehicle. The first thing he notices is that Molly has wet the street, the situation too much for her old bladder. He soothes her with gentle pets until her bones stop shaking. Next he looks to the driver, the airbag had deployed on impact so he stands up to round to the drivers side. 

The white airbag is stained crimson, and the driver is knocked out with a gash on his jaw as well as a bleeding nose. Once Robert is sure that there aren't any life threatening injuries to the driver, he turns back to get Molly off the street. 

It isn't until he walks back around to Molly that he looks at the car and where his outstretched hand had hit it. The metal around where his hand had been is crumpled and dented. It looks as if someone had beat on it with a baseball bat in one area so that it was pushed back a few inches deeper than the rest of the car. He looks down at his hand to find only minor scrapes, not a bone broken or a finger out of place. 

Robert begins to freak out because that's not possible. How could he have single handedly stopped a speeding SUV and how could he have done this and walk away virtually unharmed? He's not that strong, his brothers maybe because they work out every other day. But Robert? His arms are weak, he could hardly pass his gym class. And even if he was as strong as his brothers, that's not strong enough to stop a car. 

Robert picks Molly up and carries her to his front yard. He's surprised at how easy she is to lift, it feels more like carrying in the mail than a dog. A treacherous thought runs through his mind. However he quickly shakes it out of his mind. No one in his family line has ever been an Infectant, there's no way he is. Just to make sure though, he softly puts Molly onto the grass and walks to a tree by the side of the road. He shakes his head a little disbelievingly, what is he doing? Of course he's not an Infectant. He stretches out his shoulders then wraps his arms around the trunk of the tree. He lifts his bent knees until they are straight while also squeezing with his arms and pulling up. Almost too easily the tree is uprooted. 

Robert quickly drops the tree as if it has burned him. It slams into the ground with a hard thump and creates an indent on the grass. This cannot be happening to him. 

*  
Robert calmly walks inside despite not being calm at all. His mind is a mess, an absolute mess. It’s so cluttered that he can’t think of anything other than his life being ruined and that the MCU is going to pop out of his kitchen cupboards any moment to take him away. 

He needs to get away.

Robert sprints upstairs and starts shoving clothes into the backpack he’s emptied out for summer. He takes only the most vital items. A sweatshirt, jeans, socks, his ipod and headphones, the stash of money he keeps in a mug by his end table. Then he thinks better of it and grabs the swiss army knife Jack got him for his 12th birthday as well. He shivers at the thought of using it for anything other than whittling sticks to roast marshmallows with. 

He leaves his phone behind because, let’s be honest, he’s essentially wanted, they could track his phone, who knows? Robert has always had a tendency to overreact, but right now it seems fitting. He puts Molly in the house, but leaves no note. Maybe his family will connect the dots using the car still in the middle of the road and the uprooted tree in the front yard. Robert feels like crying when he thinks about it. 

He sets out walking to a bus stop three blocks away, hoping to take it into Chicago where he has access to trains and other buses that will hopefully bring him up north. It’s not a long drive, from the outskirts of the city to where he can get a quick route out, but by the time he gets to the station, all the busses leaving the city are no longer running. He saves his money though, and opts to sleep outside instead of getting an expensive hotel room in the heart of Chicago.

Luke wakes up from sleeping in a gross alleyway between a laundromat and a Thai restaurant. His clothes are damp from the early morning and he's fucked up his back from sleeping on the hard ground, but he's alive and safe for now. 

He ventures into the restaurant even though it can't be later than 9am and he hates spicy food. 

While he’s waiting on his meal, he starts working through what he knows. 

Robert knows he needs a name, it was best to erase that part of his life as soon as possible. He finds it difficult to throw that all away. He already lost his family, his friends, everything. But now he's losing his own name, his old life would be gone. Forever. 

He decides the simple approach would be best, meaning he chooses his middle name as a cover. From now on he will go by Luke, an orphaned boy from Chicago, who's trying to be reunited with extended family in Canada. It sounds believable to his ears, so he sticks with it wherever he ends up; diners, gas stations, even if he bumps into someone on the street.  
Robert knows that he’s an Infectant. By the looks of it, his mutation was super strength. It makes him sick just thinking about it. He knows he made the right choice in fleeing though. There was no way he could come up with an excuse for the damage to the man’s car, or the tree for that matter. Plus, someone could’ve seen. Just because his family works doesn’t mean that one of the neighbors wasn’t home and didn’t see him yesterday. It was best he left before the MCU caught even a whiff of him. 

Robert gets his food and eats alone. And that’s how the next few days go. 

He takes a bus from the city to southern Minnesota, but there aren’t many buses that run there, so he starts to make the journey by foot and hitchhiking. Southern Minnesota is mostly corn fields, but he feels like if he can get further north towards the twin cities, he can find more buses. It’s a long process and he feels like it’s taking much longer than he has time for. 

*  
Being alone for Robert is tough. He had two brothers growing up, and two loving parents, and when they weren’t devoted enough he had a dog companion But now it feels like he’s alone all the time. It scars him especially at night because he doesn’t know if the MCU is going to come snatch him in his sleep. He’s not used to it and it’s unsettling, but he can’t do much to change it, he can’t trust anyone. 

But one day he meets Ashton. Ashton is rugged and has a scruffy beard. He’s got unruly hair and a personality to match. While he thinks things through and calculates every move he makes, he also is spontaneous and adaptive. Most of all though, he offers Robert a place to stay. Or Luke, because that’s who he introduced himself as, that’s who he is now. 

Ashton says he has a friend with him who helps him look out for MCU officers and a beat up van and that their headed up North as well. He says that he’ll take Luke too, because Infectants have to look out for each other. It was all very ‘us vs. them’ and Luke felt uneasy but also a strange sense of safety, so he accepted the offer. 

*  
"This is Michael," Ashton gestures to a pale boy their age with bright red hair. He has deep purple bags under his eyes, as if he has never seen a wink of sleep in his life. But his smile is friendly and he pulls Luke straight into a hug.  
"Michael and I met a while ago when I first went on the run. He's not an Infectant but his insane at knowing where the MCU is. Without his help I would've been caught ages ago." Michael blushes and smacks Ashton on the shoulder, not roughly though because Ashton barely flinches. It's more like an affectionate pat. Everything about Michael seems soft and sleepy like that. 

"We just have to make a detour really quick and pick up Calum." Luke doesn't want to make a detour, he wants to book it straight north and be in Canada already, where it's open and safe and he can't finally start trying to be normal again. He doesn't say that though because he's afraid of being alone again. 

The detour takes them down into Iowa, and Luke doesn’t ask why Calum was a 16 hour drive away from them. 

*  
Calum is everything Ashton described him as, he seems shy but once it's just them he's loud and cheerful and too optimistic for Luke. And he's quite obviously, head over heels in love with Michael. It's so blatant that it hurts to watch Michael, who can recognize the slightest hint of MCU in the air, continue to be unaware of Calum's affections. 

Luke had talked to Calum about it one night in the dark safety of the van while Michael and Ashton hunted for firewood. Calum said it was the type of love that festers over time, that you don't even feel yourself falling into. That he and Michael had known each other for years and that one of them was bound to fall for the other, but that the line it held between unconditional and actual love was fuzzed out, where Michael saw them as brothers, Calum saw soul mates. And like the true optimistic boy he was, Calum felt that whether Michael returned his feelings or not, they would end up together regardless due to the dependent nature they had grown for each other. 

The one thing Luke doesn’t like about Calum is his view on being an Infectant.  
Calum's eyes would sparkle with childlike wonder whenever he talks about it,  
"We're heroes Luke. Like superman or Spider-Man, we have the potential to save so many people." He’d sit up straighter and march on, looking eager as always as he explains to Luke how great being an Infectant is. 

*  
Counting the detour to pick up Calum, it’s a three days drive to the border. Once they get there they find that it’s infested with MCU checkpoints, so they drive west along the border in hopes of finding a gap. It’s during this time that Luke becomes close to the other boys, so close that he forgets that their three Infectants and a helpful hound dog like friend. They seem more like college buddies on a road trip. He feels like he’s known them for his whole life. 

They’re all sitting around the fire one night, sharing old stories. Ashton, Michael, and Calum had all known each other before any of them showed any sign of being an Infectant. Their stories are wild and hilarious and Luke feels light in a way he hasn’t in a while. 

Suddenly they’re all sharing stories of how they discovered that they were what they are. Calum goes first and talks about how he was always better at swimming than everyone else, and didn’t understand why until some kids tried to hold him underwater out of spite and he found that breathing just wasn’t a thing he needed to do. Luke goes next and Calum positively swoons when he so much as mentions Molly. 

Ashton goes last. He seems unusually shifty before he starts talking. 

“I tried to commit suicide. Then I found out that I can’t die.” He shakes his head minutely, “The irony was a kick to the stomach but I’m alright now.” 

And they leave it at that because Michael and Calum already must know the whole story, and Luke would do anything to get the look of shame off of Ashton’s face. 

*  
Luke falls in love with Ashton slowly, like the first snowfall or the wind blowing dandelion seeds. At first he thinks his affections are the result of finding safety in Ashton. He lost his older brothers, the ones that looked out for him. So it only makes sense that he finds solstice in Ashton's protectiveness. Then he thinks that it's loneliness, that being on the road would of course push them together. It isn't until he finds himself staring at Ashton's lips whenever he talks, watching the curve of his back while he works on building a fire, looking at his profile while he steers the van. It isn't until he notices that everything about Ashton is safe and beautiful and there. It isn't until then that he knows the love he has for Ashton is more than platonic.

He never makes a move though. Because they’re always on the run and on the look out and on their toes. 

*  
Luke and Ashton are the only ones awake. Ashton is driving, obeying the speed limit to an extent as to not draw attention to themselves. Luke starts talking about the MCU and the hope they’re bringing despite still scaring the shit out of Luke. 

“Cure? They’re not looking for a cure Luke.” Luke shakes his head as soon as the words leave Ashton’s mouth,  
“Yes they are! That’s why so many people offer to go with the MCU, they’re helping with research so that one day we can be normal again.” Luke’s shining with glee, he wants to be normal again, he wants it more than anything. He doesn’t care what Calum says, he doesn’t want this, doesn’t want to be a hero. He just wants to be normal again.  
Ashton laughs, but it's deliberate and cold, like freezer burn to Luke’s hope.

“If you think that the MCU is using people like us for research, you couldn’t be more wrong. If you go with the MCU you are tortured then killed, same as if you refuse them in the first place. We’re like lab rats to them, disposable and inferior. There is no cure, Luke. Its just a ploy, something to appease the public as the government continues with exterminating us from the earth.” He turns to Luke then, eyes hard despite the water beading up along his lashes. “This is normal for us now, running, fighting, trying to make it north. And I’m sorry, Luke. I’m so so sorry that you had your life taken from you, but there isn’t anything I can do. I can’t help you and it kills me inside.”

He turns his eyes back to the road. 

*  
Michael and Luke are sitting in the back of the van with the door hatched open so they can swing their legs out the side. Michael looks at Luke for a moment before he fixes his gaze on Calum. His eyes are fond, so fond that Luke feels his own stomach seize up. It all tumbles into place then. That Michael loves Calum just as much. That he came on the road to protect Calum and make sure nothing bad ever happened to him. That what started out as a lifetime of friendship blossomed into a love so powerful that Michael gave up everything to make sure Calum would be safe, always. 

Luke's voice is steady as he addresses Michael, "you should tell him that you love him, because he loves you too. It would save you both a lot of heartbreak."  
Michael doesn't even look surprised, just nods and stands up. Luke watches as he strides over to Calum and Ashton, who have now gotten the fire strong enough to sit back on one of the rocks and watch it from there. Michael kneels in front of Calum and takes his face in his hands so tenderly that Luke feels himself blush. 

Michael slowly leans in and places his lips on to Calum's forehead. Then he pulls back to whisper something to Calum and shifts back in to press against his lips.  
Luke has to look away because the moment is too much for him. Of course he's happy for his friends, but he's also jealous. Michael holds Calum as if one move could break him, and more than anything Luke wants Ashton to look at him like that. If he hadn't shifted his eyes to his shoes, he would've seen Ashton look at Michael and Calum kiss, then turn to Luke with a longing expression on his face. 

*  
They fall into a steady routine, Michael on the lookout for MCU, Calum falling over him like a puppy, and Ashton and Luke dancing around each other in a way that drives the other two mad. Luke just wants to be in Canada already, it's been weeks and he’s growing more and more weary that they're never going to find an unguarded road into the north. 

One day it happens though. They are deep in Montana, their second sweep though actually, and Ashton stumbles across a dirt road that he pulls into thinking it would be a good place to set up camp for the night. But the road keeps going and going and suddenly you can feel the shift. The heavy weight crushing Luke for nearly a month lifts and it’s like he can finally breath again. They made it.

It’s not official of course until they see a sign welcoming them to Alberta Canada. And when they do, its freedom. 

Michael makes Ashton park and him and Luke leave the van so Michael and Calum can have celebrity sex. In the mean time they walk around, Luke says he’s looking for a moose which makes Ashton laugh harder than he has in days. And it feels so right, the two of them, in this new found freedom where Luke feels like he can finally work towards normal. 

And it feels so right to be next to Ashton, to have his hand brush against his own, that you really can’t blame him when he leans closer and kisses him. 

It’s awkward because they weren’t facing each other, but Luke thinks Ashton got the jist of what he was trying to get across. The he loves him. Or at least he hopes Ashton gets it because suddenly they’re kissing again and Luke feels light and bigger than his body. And it feels like the start of something new for them. 

The start of something new for all of them. 

Luke smiles.


End file.
